Scott Brown hits Seattle for Rossi

Scott Brown, the regular guy from Wrentham, Mass. who last January suddenly was the first Republican since 1972 to be elected senator from Massachusetts, came to Bellevue, Washington Tuesday to raise money for Republican Senate candidate Dino Rossi.

Brown let it be known he still is a regular guy. "I came from driving my daughter to college and I think the last thing I did was I took out the trash. It's trash day back home," he told reporters before speaking to a gathering of 400 at the Westin Hotel.

Brown, a phenomenon for having won in a state that Barack Obama had carried only 14 months earlier with 62 percent of the vote, stopped on his way to California to appear at fundraisers for Republican candidates Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman.

He said his message on his transcontinental trip was aimed not just at Republicans, but at all voters.

"Being a new guy in Washington, we need other new people who are going to look out for people's wallets and pocketbooks and focus on the debt and the spending and the taxation," Brown said.

Although Brown has been in the Senate since February, he still refers to the other 99 members of the Senate as "they."

"They are not talking; they are not working together to solve problems," he complained.

Brown said after he met Rossi, "I asked if I could help him. He didn't ask me." Rossi "cares about jobs; he has experience in that sector," Brown said.

The two men don't see eye-on-eye on the Chris Dodd-Barney Frank Wall Street reform bill that Brown voted for in July. (Brown was one of only three GOP senators to vote for the bill.)

With Rossi standing at his side, Brown said, "We're not going to agree on everything – I certainly hope not. He's from a different part of the country, different needs…. I am from Massachusetts – the number two financial services industry in the country."

Part of Rossi's criticism of the financial regulation bill was that it omitted reform of mortgage loan behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Brown asked, "Does that mean we do nothing? I felt that the rules and regulations needed to be upgraded… some of them hadn't been changed in 50 years."

Brown said the basic problem in the nation's capitol remains: "Absolutely no paying attention to the needs of average Americans." All that most Americans want, Brown said, is "take their kids out to a movie and then go out to dinner with their wives or husbands, pay their mortgage, pay for school -- and they're scared. They see the amount of debt that's been incurred." By debt he meant federal debt.

Democrats, he said, "don't want to have a true bipartisanship." He cited the $30 billion small bank lending bill which Rossi's Democratic opponent Sen. Patty Murray is pushing.

"If you let us be part of the amendment process and have one amendment" then he and other Republicans might be willing to allow the bill to move forward, Brown said. "It's very important if we're going to get this country moving again to work in a bipartisan manner to tackle these problems and Dino is going to be a great addition to that."

One attendee at the Rossi fundraiser was Republican National Committee member Fredi Simpson from Wenatchee, Wash., east of the Cascade Mountains," where we're extremely conservative." She said, "We're not going to get someone as conservative as we are to represent Massachusetts as a Republican. So Scott Brown was great."

She added, "Dino is very conservative. We're not concerned that Dino is going to be like a Scott Brown. I think Dino is between a Marco Rubio and Jim DeMint -- and Scott Brown."

Simpson acknowledged Murray's legislative skills, saying the three-term Democratic senator "had played the political chess game extremely well. She's done great things for the veterans; in Wenatchee, she helped put in a veterans clinic."

But, she said, the problem for Murray "is that people are starting to wake up."